Former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches his former running mate Nicole Shanahan speak during a campaign event at the Henry J. Kaiser Event Center in Oakland, Calif., on March 26, 2024. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — An environmental group is calling for a federal agency to investigate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who allegedly used a chainsaw to cut off the head of a dead whale, strapped it to the roof of his minivan, and drove it across state lines roughly three decades ago when he was in his 40s.
On Monday, the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, a nonprofit group, wrote a letter to directors of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asking them to investigate Kennedy for his alleged actions, which his daughter, Kick Kennedy, recounted to Town & Country in a 2012 interview. The story resurfaced this week amid tabloid reports about Kick Kennedy’s dating life.
According to the Town & Country piece, “word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port, [Massachusetts].”
“Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York,” according to the article.
A spokeswoman for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.
Kick Kennedy told the outlet, “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week suspended his independent presidential campaign and endorsed Republican Donald Trump. Trump’s campaign announced later that Kennedy would join his presidential transition team.
In the letter to the NOAA, Brett Hartl, national political director for the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, argued that Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and possibly the Endangered Species Act.
“We hope that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, at a minimum, is able to ensure that Mr. Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994,” Hartl wrote, according to a copy of the letter he provided to ABC News.
“Given Mr. Kennedy’s reckless disregard for the two most important marine conservation laws in the United States, we ask that NOAA consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well,” he wrote.
Representatives for the NOAA did not respond to an emailed question about whether the agency had decided to investigate Kennedy.
The resurfaced whale anecdote is the second story regarding Kennedy’s handling of wild animals that has drawn attention and scrutiny this summer.
Earlier this month, he told Roseanne Barr that in 2014 he jokingly planted a dead bear cub in Central Park after picking up the cub from the side of the road and putting it in the back of his vehicle.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview airing in primetime Thursday.
CNN announced Tuesday that Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz will be interviewed by anchor Dana Bash, marking the first sitdown with a reporter since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race.
The announcement came as Harris faced growing calls from critics about her availability to reporters since she took over the campaign.
Ian Sams, a senior adviser to the Harris campaign, appeared reiterated on Monday that Harris would “schedule” a sit-down interview by the end of the month.
The initial absence of plans for any such sit-down prompted accusations by Republican critics of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media, which is sure to sling several tough questions her way when she meets the press.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll numbers are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
(WASHINGTON) — Climate change may not be a top concern for voters for the 2024 presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped many Republicans from making misrepresentations about environmental and energy policy – a departure from the previous tactic of majority climate change denial, according to experts on environmental politics who spoke with ABC News.
Debates around energy policy, specifically regarding renewable energy versus fossil fuels, are inherently connected to climate change, in large part because fossil fuels are the largest contributor to climate change, according to the United Nations, accounting for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions.
In recent years, Republicans have been finding opportunities to condemn green energy, like in February 2021, when a historic freeze caused widespread power outages in Texas, affecting more than 4.5 million people and killing hundreds. At the time, some Republican politicians used the crisis to make false claims about renewable energy, claiming that it was unreliable and the cause of the outages. However, a failure to adequately winterize power sources – particularly the state’s natural gas infrastructure, which “represented 58 percent of all generating units experiencing unplanned outages, derates or failures to start” during the outage – is what caused the grid failure, according to a report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released the following November.
While many Republicans previously denied the science that human-caused emissions exacerbated climate change, experts on environmental politics say the conversation has evolved to focus less on the climate science.
“There’s been a real shift in the rhetoric in the past few years,” according to Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism. “We’ve seen this shift in rhetoric from denying the reality of climate change to maybe kind of problematizing some of the major solutions that are on the table, like wind and solar energy in particular.”
The effects of climate change are worsening in every part of the U.S., according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a breakdown of the latest in climate science coming from 14 different federal agencies, published in November.
Even so, climate change policies are not among the top of concerns for Republican voters, according to January 2024 polling from the Pew Research Center. While 54% of Americans overall view climate change as a major threat, just 12% of Republicans and those who lean Republican say dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress.
While denying climate change no longer resonates with some GOP voters as strongly as it once did, the policies that are required to transform the energy economy in the U.S. and around the world to address climate change are still unfavorable to a lot of them – hence the change in messaging, according to David Konisky, a professor of environmental politics at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.
“It’s very difficult for Republicans to reconcile any interest in addressing climate change along with messaging and a commitment to maintain reliance on fossil fuels,” Konisky told ABC News.
In the end, the widespread opposition to climate policy reform has little to do with disputing climate science and more to do with objections to the monetary cost of addressing it, according to Aseem Prakash, a professor of political science at University of Washington and director of the Center for Environmental Politics.
The Democratic and Republican divide concerning environmental issues began during the Reagan administration in the 1980s, according to Aronowsky. However, the politics of climate have changed a lot in recent years, according to Prakash. For example, Republicans rarely use the term “climate change” anymore – “it’s become a trigger word,” Prakash said – and instead are framing the subject as “renewable energy” and the problems they claim could arise from policies implementing it.
During a rally in South Carolina in September 2023, former President Donald Trump lambasted offshore wind turbines, claiming that the “windmills are driving [whales] crazy” and are causing an increase in the number of dead whales washing ashore – one of many false claims the former president has made about wind power. During a Republican fundraising dinner in 2019, Trump also claimed that noise from the wind turbines causes cancer, and that they are a “graveyard for birds.”
The rhetoric has surfaced in local politics, too, according to the experts. A protest against offshore wind turbines that took place in February 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, featured several local Republicans, including the mayors of New Jersey’s Seaside Park and Point Pleasant Beach, and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith.
Despite the claims, there are “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Many Republicans are also talking about oil in new ways, touting domestic oil as cleaner and more pristine than imported oil, though supporting data has been absent. Trump has vowed to boost U.S. oil production if elected to a second term, promising to “drill, baby, drill” to lower the costs of energy. Yet data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration in March showed that the United States “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time, according to our International Energy Statistics, for the past six years in a row” – 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, during the Biden administration, breaking the record set in 2019 of 12.3 million during the Trump administration.
Playing into those politics are gasoline prices, which have become a partial barometer of economic security, Matt Huber, a professor in Syracuse University’s geography and environment department, told ABC News. He also noted that that the oil and gas industry has history of funding research that contradicts climate science.
The state of modern American politics includes heavy investment by the fossil fuel industry into the Republican Party and its candidates, Konisky said: “I think that has become almost religious doctrine for many in the Republican Party … whatever the U.S. energy future looks like, it must rely heavily on fossil fuels.”
Donald Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, received $354,937 in funding from the oil and gas industry as of March 2023, according to Open Secrets, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. While the vice-presidential hopeful spoke publicly about the country’s “climate problem” as recently as 2020, he changed his position in 2023 after he was elected to the Senate, championing fracking and decrying clean energy ever since, Politico reported.
Neither the Republican National Committee nor the Trump/Vance campaign responded to an ABC News request for comment.
Other established Republican senators have received much more funding from oil companies than Vance has. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has received nearly $8.7 million from the oil and gas industry. Texas Sen. John Cornyn has received $5.1 million, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has received more than $5 million, according to Open Secrets.
Another explanation for the Republican departure from climate denial is that it’s becoming an increasingly untenable position to assert that climate change is not real, Lise Van Susteren, a general and forensic psychiatrist who has researched how climate change has affected people’s psychological health, told ABC News.
The main reason is that the effects of climate change are now happening in people’s backyards, she said. Those effects include extreme wildfires, drought, a higher frequency of major hurricanes, and sea level rise.
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith has charged former President Donald Trump in a superseding indictment in his federal election interference case.
“Today, a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia returned a superseding indictment, ECF No. 226, charging the defendant with the same criminal offenses that were charged in the original indictment,” a Justice Department spokesperson said Tuesday.
“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions,” the spokesperson said.
Trump last August pleaded not guilty to federal charges of undertaking a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election to remain in power. Last month, in a blockbuster decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump is entitled to immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts undertaken while in office, and sent the case back to the trial court to sort out which charges against him can stand.
The superseding indictment retains the four original charges against Trump from the special counsel’s original indictment — but is pared down to adjust to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
While the original indictment laid out five ways Trump allegedly obstructed the function of the federal government — having state election officials change electoral votes, arranging fraudulent slates of electors, using the Department of Justice to conduct “sham” investigations, enlisting the Vice President to obstruct the certification of the election, and exploiting the chaos of the Jan. 6 riot — the new indictment removes mention of his use of the Department of Justice, which was explicitly mentioned in the Supreme Court’s ruling as falling within his official duties.
While the original indictment mentions the Justice Department on over 30 occasions, the new indictment makes no mention of the DOJ. It also reframes the portion of the original indictment outlining that Trump allegedly knew his claims of election fraud were false.
The superseding indictment identifies Trump as “a candidate for President of the United States … who was also the incumbent President” and says that he “had no officials responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results.”
The new indictment is 36 pages, while the original indictment was 45.
It comes just days after Smith, in a filing, urged the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a federal judge’s surprise dismissal of Trump’s classified documents case.
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith has charged former President Donald Trump in a superseding indictment in his federal election subversion case.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(BIG RAPIDS, Mich.) — Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance stepped on stage in Big Rapids, Michigan, on Tuesday and spoke behind a bulletproof glass during his remarks outside — the first time he’s done so at his own campaign event.
It’s similar to the new safety measures in place for former President Donald Trump’s outdoor rallies following his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
Vance did have bulletproof glass in Asheboro, North Carolina, last week, but that was a joint event with the former president.
Speaking on the economy and jobs at a farm in Michigan, Vance began speaking about the Labor Department overstating its monthly job growth and then accused the Biden-Harris administration of inflating its job numbers to cover up the economy’s problems.
“Now, last week, the biggest heist in American history happened right under Kamala Harris’ nose,” Vance claimed. “Somebody stole 818,000 jobs that she and Tim Walz had been bragging about. Did y’all see that? Where did they go?”
He accused the administration of “cooking the books to hide how bad the economy really is under Kamala Harris.”
When discussing Harris’ record, Vance claimed that Harris doesn’t know what she believes.
“In some ways, I feel bad for Kamala Harris,” he said. “… But I’m not sure that this is a woman who knows what she actually believes.”
Harris, who laid out her economic agenda earlier this month, is still working to define her stances on several key voter issues. The vice president has already distanced herself from some of her former positions laid out in her 2020 presidential bid.
Vance referred back to Harris’ remarks at the Democratic National Convention last week, where she said there would be “consequences” putting Trump back into the Oval Office, asking “is she the vice president or the vice principal?”
Later, speaking to reporters, Vance said those Harris comments don’t resonate with Americans.
“I don’t think that’s persuasive to most Americans and warning them about voting for the wrong person is just, I think it’s ridiculous,” Vance said.
(WASHINGTON) — Once dubbed the longest general election ever, the 2024 presidential race has been flipped on its head.
A rapid ticket shuffle in the Democratic Party means what is typically a year of campaigning will be boiled down to just 10 weeks as newly-nominated Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump hit the trail after their party conventions.
Harris will be looking to maintain her momentum and Trump, in turn, will try to blunt any further progress for Democrats after President Joe Biden’s decision to step aside resulted in a significant energy shift.
“What the Harris campaign did was bring polling back to normal, and normal in a polarized age means dead heat races nationally,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told ABC News. “Now we have what’s clearly a tied race going forward.”
Next up as the race kicks into high gear, Ayres said, will be a laser-focus on the handful of swing states that will determine the electoral college winner — an area where Trump’s generally had the upper hand this cycle.
Harris this week is campaigning with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, in Georgia for the first time. Trump is ratcheting up his appearances with stops in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The shorter campaign generally favors Harris, strategists on both sides of the aisle said, but still presents challenges for both candidates.
“The compressed calendar has reduced the surface area of attack for the Trump campaign,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “Having to navigate a 100-day window of scrutiny is preferable to having to endure a year’s worth of attacks from your opponents.”
It also makes it likelier Harris can keep the momentum last until Americans begin casting their ballots, which in some places starts as early as late September.
“They’re peaking at the right time,” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said of the Harris-Walz ticket. “And that’s what you want to do in politics because the worst thing you can do — and Trump may be suffering from this — is peak too soon.”
Still, it means less time for Harris to deliver her message to voters, who may have questions about where she stands on certain policies given her limited agenda rollout since her late entry as the nominee. Trump, meanwhile, has name recognition and legislative positions stretching back nine years.
“It’s harder for the Harris campaign to get her policies out in a short campaign,” said Douglas Herman, who led Barack Obama’s mail strategy in 2008 and 2012. “It’s harder to fill in all of the details in a short campaign.”
“The major objective for the Harris campaign is to continue to put meat on the bones for the voters,” Herman added.
Plus, if any serious blunders are made, there is less time for Harris to bounce back.
Her next big test will be her promised interview since becoming the nominee. No date has been set, though Harris said she would get her team to schedule an interview before the end of the month.
“The real risk of Harris avoiding the media for an extended period of time is first, it can’t go on forever,” said Madden. “And second, it just builds up anticipation for that first interview or press conference and turns it into a major event. That just creates added pressure on the performance.”
Then next month, Harris and Trump will meet for their first debate hosted by ABC News. The showdown, set for Sept. 10., will be held at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
There will also undoubtedly be unknown external factors that will impact the campaigns over the next 70 days.
“This race is so close now that I can’t help but believe it’s going to be decided by events that haven’t happened yet,” said Ayres. “When we think back on what’s happened over the last six weeks, it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict what might happen over the next six or 10 weeks.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview — something she told reporters this month she planned to do by the end of August, but has yet to announce.
With an absence of plans for any such sit-down, Republican critics have accused her of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media, which is sure to sling several tough questions her way when she meets the press.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll number are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred an enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
(WASHINGTON) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, two previous Democrats, have joined former President Donald Trump’s transition team, the campaign confirmed to ABC News.
“As President Trump’s broad coalition of supporters and endorsers expands across partisan lines, we are proud that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard have been added to the Trump/Vance Transition team,” Trump campaign’s senior adviser Brian Hughes told ABC News in a statement.
“We look forward to having their powerful voices on the team as we work to restore America’s greatness,” Hughes continued.
Kennedy, who was until recently Trump’s opponent in the presidential race and a subject of Trump’s name-calling, and Gabbard, the former congresswoman who represented Hawaii and left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run, have both endorsed Trump in the last few days.
It’s not yet clear what roles Kennedy and Gabbard will be playing in the Trump-Vance transition team.
Others leading the transition effort include some of Trump’s family members as well as his major donors, including former U.S. Administrator of the Small Business Administration Linda McMahon, billionaire and Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, running mate Sen. JD Vance and sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
Gabbard joined Trump on the campaign trail in Detroit on Monday where she later endorsed him.
She will also join him and moderate a town hall in La Crosse, Wisconsin, later this week. Gabbard has been helping Trump prepare for his first debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10, the Trump campaign previously told ABC News.
After suspending his campaign on Friday, Kennedy endorsed Trump and said he would remove himself from the ballot in states where his presence could hurt Trump.
The New York Times was first to report the new additions to the transition team.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to soon face her first post-convention test when she sits for a formal interview — something she told reporters this month she planned to do by the end of August, but has yet to announce.
With an absence of plans for any such sit-down, Republican critics have accused her of dodging the press.
“She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences, almost 30 days now, she has not done an interview,” former President Donald Trump said of Harris at a North Carolina event earlier this month. “You know why she hasn’t done an interview? Because she’s not smart. She’s not intelligent.”
His campaign has said Harris is trying to “duck and hide” from the news media.
The lack of a media interview has yet to hurt Harris, whose poll number are outpacing those of President Joe Biden when he was atop the Democratic ticket, according to 538’s national polling average. As of Tuesday, Harris is polling ahead of Trump, 47.2% to 43.6%; when Biden left the race, he was polling at 40.2% compared to Trump’s 43.5%, according to 538’s polling average.
Harris has also stirred an enthusiasm from Democrats that had been absent most of the campaign cycle — and is riding a high following last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Moreover, she chose a running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose rural background has helped the ticket craft a message Democrats have said they believe will make inroads with voters in conservative parts of the country.
All the while, Trump has seemed to abandon the discipline Republicans had lauded him for this summer. Recently, he has made false claims about the crowd size at a Harris rally and appeared to forget to mention a policy proposal he had been slated to unveil at an event in Michigan.
Democrats have cautioned that Harris has several hurdles to clear in the coming weeks.
One of those hurdles is the pending media interview, where Harris would likely have to defend the decisions of the Biden administration and specify some of her policy stances.
On Monday, Trump sought to spotlight Harris’ connection to the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, laying wreaths in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the third anniversary of the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members.
“Caused by Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed when he spoke to National Guardsmen at a Detroit event later Monday.
Harris is also likely to be pressed on how much she knew about Biden’s capacities prior to the June 27 debate. That night, she urged Americans to judge Biden not on the “90 minutes” on stage but the “three-and-a-half years of performance.”
Yet, that same debate performance set in motion a weekslong effort by top Democrats to nudge Biden from the race.
Few had a better understanding of what Biden was like behind the scenes than Harris, his No. 2, and an interviewer would likely challenge her about what she witnessed in private.
Harris would surely be asked about the war in Gaza. She said recently, “We need a cease-fire,” but is a member of an administration that has yet to help broker one.
The situation at the southern border would likely be another topic an interviewer would press Harris on. Republicans have linked her to an increase in unauthorized border crossings earlier in Biden’s term, misleadingly dubbing her the “border czar.”
An interviewer might also ask Harris to respond to the criticism of her recently unveiled economic plan, in which she called for an end to grocery “price-gouging,” prompting accusations by some Republicans that she wants “communist price controls.”
Harris travels this week to south Georgia, where she will embark on a bus tour and hold a rally in Savannah, Georgia.
